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Lost Innocence

After radiation was over, many people said, “You’re done! That must feel great.” Yet, I didn’t feel great and I certainly didn’t feel done.

“If anything, I feel as if I’m just beginning,” I told my friend Diane. “For the past ten months I’ve been on autopilot following the doctors orders. Now I have to remember who I was and what my life was before I was consumed with medical appointments. It’s kind of like the Stockholm syndrome.”

“You miss chemo and radiation?” she asked.

“No, but it was all consuming so in a way it made my life simple. I feel sort of lost now that it’s over.”

She nodded, but I’m not sure she understood what I was talking about. I’m not sure I did. I wanted to feel joyful and celebratory, but on my last day of radiation I wept. I didn’t drink the champagne chilling in my refrigerator, I didn’t invite friends over to celebrate, I didn’t even feel happy or relieved. Instead, the enormity of the past ten months finally caught up to me and I cried.

Once the sadness passed I felt rudderless. During my biopsy, the nurse said, “No matter what the results, you’ve lost your innocence today.”

No I haven’t, I thought to myself. You’re going to tell me it’s nothing and I’ll go on my merry way.

But it wasn’t nothing and I’ve recalled her words dozens of times since that day last May. Losing my innocence was the cause of my rudderless feeling. It wasn’t that I was consumed with fear that the cancer would return, it was more of the fact that I was no longer sure of things I had counted on and been absolutely sure of. When faced with hard times, I used to say, “At least I have my health.” I was confident that my daily exercise and organic diet would protect me for years to come. But it didn’t. And if I didn’t have my health, the one thing I was so sure of and grateful for, what else didn’t I have?

The rudderless was due to a second loss as well, the loss of innocence about writing. Three days after the biopsy with the wise nurse, and one day before being diagnosed (wow, last May was a poignant month), my friend Teresa asked me what my safety net was. We were on a very long walk together and she was trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of my career, and more specifically, my financial situation.

“Safety net?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re single, so it’s not your spouse’s income. Most writers have a part-time job or are married, so I’m wondering what your back up reserves are. How will you ever retire?”

“Retire?” I asked as if it was a foreign word. “God, I’ve just been so happy to be able to pay my bills I guess I haven’t thought about retirement. But now that you bring it up, I think I always assume my next book will be my safety net. I’ll either get a large advance or something will happen with it to get me out of survival mode and rebuild my savings.”

She accepted this answer and I went on my merry way. But similarly to the nurse’s comments, I’ve recalled this conversation with Teresa many times in the past ten months. I shared it with several of my writer friends and almost all of them confessed that their writing was not their safety net.

“What?” I asked my writing award winning friend Bonnie. “Your advance must have been significant.” She laughed when I said that and then told me the amount of her advance. “Ouch. OK, well how about royalties then? You won that prestigious award, you must have sold a lot of books after that.”
“I haven’t seen a dime in royalties.”

Ouch again.

A similar conversation transpired with a friend whose memoir was on the New York Times bestseller list. “I made about twelve grand last year and all of it went back into marketing my book.”

Ouch again. My divorce book had not won a prestigious award, nor had it been on the NY Times bestseller list. In fact, my kids’ lemonade stand had a better sales record than my book. It was not a strong safety net.

“Wow,” I said to my friend Jennifer, another writer friend. “I definitely didn’t think this career choice all the way through.”

“Of course you didn’t. None of us did. It’s a pipe dream.”

She could see her words were not helping my mood, so she quickly clarified, “But Corbin, you have your editing. That’s your safety net.”

“I wouldn’t call being a freelance editor job security.”

I carried on in my rudderless state for a couple of weeks. And during that time, I realized I was getting up in the morning, just as I had done my whole life. I was caring for my kids, just as I had done for their whole life. And after drinking my morning coffee, I turned on the computer, just as I had done for the past fifteen years. Everything had changed, but in some ways, nothing had changed.

I was still a single parent of two kids, but our relationship had deepened and changed over the year. I wasn’t the only one who lost her innocence-my kids did as well. Conor has two friends who are losing relatives to cancer right now. Where before “cancer” and “dying” caused all of us to nervously glance at one another, I recently heard him saying to his friend, “That sucks about your grandma. I’d be really sad if that was my grandma. And if it was my mom…. Well, I don’t even know what I’d do.”

And Stella has become my shadow. Ever since the day she saw me lying in bed, pale from chemo, she has kept a close eye on me. “Boo!” she shouts as she sneaks up on me periodically throughout the day. “I wanted to see what you were doing.” Then she crawls in next to me on the couch and tells me about her latest cartwheel attempts.

The pattern of my day resembles what it had been before, but my awareness has changed. When Stella crawls into bed with me while I am trying to have five minutes of peace, I understand she needs to do this. I also understand I don’t need to talk to her, she just needs to see me. I can still have my five minutes of peace, only it will be with her.

As for my work, I’ve had a year of steady editing clients. This could remain to be true or it could change and in either case, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I have a sense of financial security. After nearly fifteen years of being self-employed I no longer doubt my resourcefulness when it comes to being able to pay my bills. I have also learned that when one avenue dries up, it may not be comfortable, but it’s usually because it is time for me to move on from that avenue. If the editing work stops coming, maybe it’s time for me to get into the lemonade business.

I still work on my novel, but I do so when I feel like it, not because I have a sense of urgency around it. My writing has always been my writing, meaning it is something I do because I enjoy it and it gratifies me. It may financially reward me some day, or it may not, but again, it doesn’t really matter. It emotionally satisfies me, so I will continue to do it.

And as for my health, it seems to be returning to a somewhat “normal” place. I’m able to practice yoga several times a week, lift weights, and hike and walk as I used to. I do these things because I enjoy them, not because I hope they will prevent cancer from coming back. I can’t control what happens to my body or career, but I never could.

I think my loss of “innocence” is really a loss of a fallacy. And maybe that’s an all right thing to lose.

Corbin Lewars has been teaching writing and free-lancing as a writing coach and developmental editor for almost twenty years. Her latest book, Losing Him, Gaining You, is available now.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.